Balanoor Tea Estate, Karnataka Piece of Cake His birthday was celebrated in a leafy residential section of Bangalore, one of India’s more modern, connected cities. Thirty members of the prosperous Kuriyan clan milled about the cavernous apartment in the condominium complex they erected 15 years ago. Venerable tea and coffee planter, Ashok Kuriyan, the […]
Category: innovation
Tea, Cha and Tisanes: Botanicals Reshape Tea Demand and Supply
There’s been a growing shift in the strange, unfamiliar and exotic words you’ll see on a tea ingredient label or description: it can be summarized as yesterday chemistry and botanicals today (and probably biogenetic propagation tomorrow.) Yesterday’s chemistry: sodium caseinate, modified corn starch, resveratrol extract, riboflavin, soy lecithin, ascorbyl glucoside, xylitol, sodium hexametaphosphate, and “natural” […]
Climate Change: Growers Fight Back
It’s no news that climate change is a growing, severe and global problem. Alas, it’s also not news that this is getting worse. For the tea industry, the impacts are becoming more and more apparent. The consensual figure is that 20-50% of the positives of tea will be lost within the next two to three […]
Tea Packaging: The Innovation Edge
Innovation in tea increasingly depends on innovation in packaging Make the tea bag go away Change the labels Freshen up Don’t hide the evidence That may all sound negative. What it really amounts to is: Don’t treat packaging in its dictionary sense of being just a container. Packaging is more than how tea is stored […]
Innovation in Tea: Watch These Spaces
The Innovation Imperative: Where and How, not If In a time of change, the question is not whether to innovate, but how. For tea, it’s also urgent. There are challenges to business as usual everywhere: sustainable development, shifting consumer tastes and demographics, coffee competition, yields, costs, and quality, to name just the obvious. The good […]